The Transversal
by Dan Maculla
Summary: Set in an alternate history United States, the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 sets off a chain of events culminating in a global apocalypse. Professor Haytch Lovell escapes the destruction to Northern California, where he realizes the terrible truth behind the end of life as we know it. I will read and reply to all reviews. Enjoy!
1. Chapter 1

**THE TRANSVERSAL**

**I**

It is with the last graspings of sanity and life that I transcribe my account here, for I have seen truths that the pitiful minds of mortal men were never meant to behold. Beside this pen and paper upon which I now write lies a revolver that I will use to end my existence, which is as meaningless as the universe we inhabit, once I am finished enunciating the terrible truth I've discovered beyond that wretched doorway of aether. I write this only to preserve the merciful ignorance of any a curious soul that would dare venture into that daemonic attic and transverse that cosmic doorway, and as such will leave it sealed in an envelope tacked upon the attic door until its discovery.

I will attempt to start at the beginning. My name is Haytch Lovell. I was born on the Twentieth of February in the year 1870 in the home of my parents, Elena and Jefferson Lovell in San Francisco, California, although as you are aware, time matters little now and has proven to be as malleable as a viscous jelly, as have many of the universal constants. My family was of well-bred and well-educated stock, and belonged to an ancient Massachusetts clan of liberalists. My father was a professor in the distant city of Boston before migrating to the frontier West with my mother in aftermath of the States War, where he resumed his life of academia and borne me unto the doomed world.

I was raised to be an upstanding man by them and followed in my father's footsteps of professorship, which I obtained only two years before the great cataclysms which started in the dreaded year of 1906. By that time, my mother had mercifully died of the white death several years before hand, and my heart-broken father took his own life as well by drowning himself in the San Francisco Bay. I speak of my lineage only to articulate that my transversal and subsequent revelations were not borne of an illness of the mind or putrid soul, but are indeed truths which no man should or shall experience without losing the very essence of his soul.

At the time of the cataclysms, I was living in the midst of San Francisco on Nob Hill and had professorship at San Francisco State University. I lived with my manservant and dearest friend, whose name and experiences I now pity, Bryson, an old servant of the Lovell clan who I knew since my distant youth. I can still remember clearly, even in the fogs of my current madness, the terrible April day when the earthquake hit, that terrible April day when the fate of the universe had not been determined, but merely reached the lonely corner of the stars which we as a species inhabit. I had been awake for but twenty minutes, preparing my class schedule for Wednesday's lecture when the walls of my Nob Hill home began to shake with the fury of a thousand angry gods beneath the earth. My loyal Bryson came running into my study and saw to our quick escape from my home, just before it completely collapsed along with half of the city.

Soon the infernos broke out across San Francisco, engulfing the city in flames and ensuring that the poor souls who had been spared by the quake would suffer the lickings of flames as well. Bryson and I worked all throughout that day to assist in the evacuations before we were forced to leave the city of my birth and heritage along with the rest of its pitiful migrants, but not before meeting up with a colleague of mine from the university, Dr. Elias B. Shepard of the astronomy department. The three of us travelled by train up to the capital Sacramento, along the way hearing queer whispers about yet greater cataclysms happening elsewhere throughout the country and the globe. It seemed the terrifying April quake in San Francisco was but the start of some great chain of terrible events, which recalled in my mind the mad ramblings of the minister of my boyhood church regarding the end times and Book of Revelations. I hate to pay that mad Methodist any credence now, but it certainly seems to most everyone, myself included, that we have reached the end.

Once arriving in Sacramento, Shepard, Bryson and I were flung into the mass of refugee camps that had been hastily constructed by the state government and military. Disturbingly, we had noticed that a minority of the refugees came not from the Bay Area which had just suffered the heralding quake, but from lands east of California in the sparsely populated silver country of Nevada. Of the Nevadans I spoke with, they too talked of a great cataclysm that had befallen them, of a great shaking and upheaval of the earth and great convulsions of fire and molten rock from the ground that had utterly destroyed Carson City and most of the small towns spread throughout the state. It became clear to most everyone in the camps that a great change was taking place, and that us Californians had suffered along with the rest of humanity. Our fears were confirmed throughout that wretched week in Sacramento. The newspapers that we could access spoke of great quakes and cataclysms befalling the Midwest and Southern states, in areas both metropolitan and rural. There had been reports of eldritch mountains suddenly appearing in the otherwise flat farmlands of Kansas and Nebraska, which were, according to the papers, communicated to them via telegraph by a hysterical army officer stationed in Omaha who had been assisting with the evacuations in the Midwest. There were even more sinister rumors of a monumental wave of water surging across the Atlantic and into the doomed shores of Europe, and that directly south of us the regions in the vicinity of great Los Angeles were being swallowed whole by the gaping maw of the Pacific. These grand tales were seemingly confirmed when in early May a wretchedly ragged group of refugees from the southern areas of the state made it into Sacramento, and rambled ceaselessly about Los Angeles sinking slowly and awesomely into the sea.

This created quite a sensation of panick amongst us refugees, and riots soon broke out across the city. Men, women, and children clamored and fought with each other over control of various resources that were whisked away from market shelves, general goods stores, and even the carts of unfortunate farmers and merchants who were beaten into submission. The military nominally declared control of Sacramento and tried to quell the riots, but my party and I often saw young recruits deserting their stations and joining in the fray, alarmingly equipped with firearms, knives, and other instruments of destruction. I am ashamed to admit that my party and I joined in this insanity too, for the instinct of survival is a strong and ugly one.

Eventually we decided we must leave Sacramento, which was being consumed by riots and chaos. We conspired with several of our fellow refugees to leave the city in a small caravan of horses, wagons, and all the supplies we could muster through preservation and yes, looting.

We left the doomed city on the Twentieth of May, near one month after the earthquake in San Francisco, for refuge the various towns and forests in the foothills region of the Sierra Nevada range. Shepard spoke of a summer home his family maintained betwixt the regions of Sutter's Mill and Cassidy Hill, and we decided the three of us would venture with the caravan until reaching the Auburn region and heading for Shepard's summer home ourselves.

We travelled for three long days with the caravan, our progress being beset by various fires that had broken out in the forested regions in which we travelled. Members of our party also seemed by to be succumbing to a strange flu-like illness the likes of which nobody, not even our party's medical doctor Peabody, had seen before. We came to the conclusion this too was a form of the cataclysms currently sweeping mankind. Of the twenty-eight of us that set out from Sacramento on the twentieth, only thirteen remained by the time we finally reached the Auburn region on the Twenty-Third. The town was strangely abandoned, but we discovered numerous corpses that had evidently died of the flu-like illness throughout the houses and shops of that city. Thus we surmised its residents had fled the city to escape the illness. We carefully avoided the remains of the dead to prevent ourselves from being infected.

On the Twenty-Fourth Shepard, Bryson, and I separated from our party and started our trek towards Shepard's summer home. Our journey was only a day longer than the one from Sacramento to Auburn, but was beset by great tragedy and peril nonetheless. The wildlife had become abnormally aggressive and neurotic, no doubt another manifestation of the global cataclysms, and we had to stop at an abandoned trading outpost near Sutter's Mill to outfit ourselves with firearms and other hunting gear to keep the mad beasts at bay. We discovered other effects of the great change as well. We noticed the rapid decay of various plant life and human structures, and noticed our hair was rapidly becoming grey with premature age. Disturbingly though, the lines of our middle-aged faces were fading, and it seemed we were simultaneously becoming older and younger, as had other objects and organisms in our seemingly decaying world. Shepard, ever a scientist of the natural world, theorized that we were suffering some form of universal decay, a degradation of the forces, such as time, matter, and energy, that hold our reality intact. This would indeed explain the global cataclysms, strange diseases, and queer shifts in time and matter that we had been experiencing. He told us this eldritch hypothesis around our camp's fire the day before our arrival at his cabin.

Poor Shepard would not live to see it though. Later that night, I awoke from my slumber by the fading embers of the fire to the distant mad laughter of Shepard, who I spotted some yards away in a clearing gazing through his telescope that he insistently brought with him all the way from San Francisco. The moonlight, which was queerly tinged with a crimson color, shone on his face expressions of pure insanity and hopelessness. I approached poor Shepard apprehensively, both fearing and pitying that brilliant mind turned irrevocably mad, and found myself shivering mostly not at Shepard's loss of sanity but at what _caused _his loss of sanity. I tapped him nervously on his twitching shoulder and inquired stupidly as to his obvious condition. He quickly wheeled around to me, taking his right eye out of the telescope but still reeling with maniacal laughter. Even after my shocking revelation, the _tone _of his words still haunt me:

"The stars, Lovell, they are going out. One by one by one!"


	2. Chapter 2

**THE TRANSVERSAL **

**II**

At this moment Shepard's laughter broke out into sobs of despair and he rushed at me, clasping my neck in his hands which I observed were wrinkled with unnatural age yet paradoxically blessed with youthful strength. My cries must have awoken Bryson, if he was not already awake, and he ran over to us, pistol in hand, and yanked the being that was Shepard off of me and threw him to the moonlit ground. Bryson cocked the revolver and after a single second emptied the entire chamber into Shepard's body, whom I observed seemed to laugh and sob throughout his death. I could never be sure, but I thought I heard Bryson mutter a soft sob of apology to Shepard after executing him.

Bryson and I left early the next morning, not before burying poor Shepard. We left his infernal telescope as it stood, a strange artificial tripod in a forest of decaying nature. Neither of his dared look through that lens all night lest we see what Shepard saw and lose our minds as well.

That afternoon we found what we supposed was Shepard's cabin, which seemed to have both aged and solidified. We could never be sure if the cabin was indeed Shepard's, but its outward appearance was certainly that which he described, and regardless we did not care now, nor did anyone we supposed. Most importantly it was here, in this paradoxical bungalow betwixt Sutter's Mill and Cassidy Hill that we discovered that hellish doorway into the cosmos in the attic, and that I must implore you, being whoever finds this testimony, to NOT ENTER.

I will tell you now why you should not.

After Bryson kicked the door into the cabin we settled in and distributed our equipment and food about the house. We figured this was, for all intents and purposes, our home now and for however long we were doomed to inhabit this dying planet. After having settled in, we immediately went upstairs and found two glorious bedrooms where we could once again get a good night's rest, the first we had since that damned April morning in San Francisco. Yet before we turned in we both detected a low humming noise, one that while quiet, was ever maddening due to the pure alien nature of it. We attempted to ignore it at first, but found that nigh impossible. At last, in the black of the night, Bryson and I ventured throughout the house, lanterns in hand, to discover the source of that insane hum.

We checked every room of the ground floor, top floor, and cellar. We even searched the moonlit grounds immediately outside the cabin, which were lit by that queer crimson light. Eventually we pinpointed the source of the hum to be in the attic, and Bryson and I ventured up there together, rightfully fearful of what we would find.

The source of the hum was in there, and it would prove to be the source of all the pain and misery humanly imaginable, for inside the attic we discovered that eldritch, ephemeral portal that I am sure you have by now witnessed. A shimmering gate that more resembled a tear in the very fabric of reality than anything else, which bore an indescribable convex shape that glittered in sour light. It was something that seemed neither natural or artificial, but _cosmic. Universal. _It was beyond the realms of human imagination or natural order, and undoubtedly another aspect of that bizarre universal decay of which poor Shepard spoke before his untimely death.

If Bryson or I had any wisdom, we would have left the attic then and there and cursed it and the entire house to oblivion, leaving for some other refuge in the Sierra Nevada foothills. But in our merciful ignorance we were intellectually aroused by that strange convex doorway which hummed maddeningly. Bryson and I studied it for sometime in the attic which was grotesquely illuminated by our dimming lanterns.

Eventually our black curiosity waned enough for us to return to our slumber, which was unbroken now that we had come to terms with the source of the low humming.

And it is here, reader, that everything changed.

I awoke the next morning to the dim light of the wavering sun and the most horrific sound I have ever heard in my entire earthly existence. The sound plunged me deplorably from my unconsciousness and into cruel reality. The sound was subhuman and indescribably painful to me, and I could only imagine the agony of the creature that was emitting it. The sound was Bryson, screaming the most soul-shattering shriek you could imagine.

I raced out of my bedroom and into the upper floor hallway, detecting along the way the screams were emanating from the attic which held the insane convex portal. I ran to the middle of the hallway and pulled down the trapdoor which led into that forbidden room, letting its wooden steps fall to my feet. I began to climb, but not before glancing back at the windows through which the dim, dying light of our star came directly through from its cosmic source. It was then that I realized, having studied the cabin top to bottom the day before during our settling in, that the windows faced _northwestward, not eastward. _

I shook this terrible realization off and scrambled hastily up the stairs. In the attic, I found poor Bryson, stripped to his bare skin, crumpled into the fetal position of small child or dying animal on the floor immediately in front of that accursed convex portal. His shrieks continued nonstop, I felt as if those screams penetrated in the deepest corners of my soul and shut off all sensations of hope or happiness. His hands were clasped tightly on his head, as if some great force was pushing on it from the inside.

I fell to Bryson's side and attempted to console him but to no avail. As I held him tenderly and with all the care I could muster, he continued to shriek those terribly, soul crushing screams. Eventually, after a passing of minutes, or hours, or days for I cannot tell how long I sat there with Bryson in my arms, he took off towards the stairs leading out of the attic. I called after him, but to no avail, as he immediately slipped when he entered the steps and tumbled down to the upper floor below. I came after him, deeply concerned, and found to my relief, or all that I could muster after hearing those screams, that Bryson was merely unconscious. I took him into his bedroom and changed him into a nightgown before letting him rest on his bed.

But I could not stop thinking, what had poor Bryson witnessed in the attic that caused him to enter that pitiful state. Another manifestation of the decay? Or did poor Bryson decide to venture into that convex portal, which though it did not cause me terror yet, I knew to hold secrets of experiences which no man could endure. And yet I was allured by the portal, attracted to it and its undoubtedly forbidden secrets. After the whole of the day, as Bryson lie sleeping, I decided to venture into the attic to at least reexamine the convex doorway for possible clues to Bryson's fate. After some time examining the portal, I resolved to entering it.

This is, reader, the worst mistake any mortal mind could make in this dark age. There are secrets no one should know, as they can never comprehend them. What lie behind that convex portal was one of those secrets. I will tell you what it was now, in the hope that it will satiate your curiosity and prevent you from _experiencing _the mad depths of cosmic despair that are on the other side of that doorway.

For a brief second after I entered the portal, all the world became pure blackness. All of my senses were briefly shut off, save for my ears, which faintly detected a distant humming that was surely the true source of the noise Bryson and I had detected the day before, rather than the doorway itself. Then suddenly every sense burst forth again with painful clarity. I found myself being pulled from the Earth itself, and I could see the ground of mortal Earth beneath me disappearing as I was pulled up through the heavens. There was a brief roar of sound as I exited the atmosphere of our planet, and then the rest of my unimaginable journey was spent in terrible silence.

I saw myself being whisked past the planets of our infinitesimally small solar system which poor Shepard had no doubt studied through the merciful lens of his telescope in a bygone era of cosmic orderliness. After a time which seemed both maddeningly long and impossibly short considering the distance I was supposedly covering, I was whisked out of our sun's reach and into the vast, daemonic aether of our cosmos. I sensed being flung past uncountable nebulae of every shape and color, and stars which, like our earthly sun, seemed to be dying and dimming, or going out altogether not in great explosions, but in silent fading. I soared past indescribably horrific galactic landscapes of dying star clusters, bizarre planets and asteroids, and strange masses and formations I can't put down in words, save for the fact that they were ALIVE.

Eventually I passed entirely out of our region of the universe and gazed horrifically down upon the decaying spiral of our Milky Way, which was losing all sense of formation and order. I then soared for what seemed like unimaginable ages throughout the dark aether of extragalactic space, picking up speed as I did. As I looked around me at the galaxies I saw they were all suffering the same decay as our dismal, small corner of our dismal, small universe. Eventually I seemed to be travelling so fast that these galaxies and cosmic landscapes all swirled together into a ray of mad, multicolor light that surrounded me. I continued along this shaft of heavenly light for what seemed like aeons, before I burst out of it and the very rim of our sad universe into the truth.

I struggle even now to put down one word about what I found outside of the realm of our tiny, dying universe, but I will for your sake. As I exited that shaft of light I found myself in a terrible region of aether beyond all conceptions of time or space. It was beyond cosmic, beyond horrible. It was unknowable, yet known to me. Before me were _countless, COUNTLESS _universes! Each one appeared to my mortal eyes but a simple, glowing bubble of a billion billion stars and worlds, which stretched infinitely out before me in every direction I turned my head. There was no end to these countless universes, and to my indescribable horror I saw they all were marked by the unmistakable dim light of decay and cataclysm that our own world, tucked into a pointless region of a pointless galaxy in a pointless universe, had shown.

Before me were cosmos upon cosmos, each containing uncountable worlds and infinite lives as meaningless as our own, in what I can best describe as an eternal field, like the rows of corn in dead Nebraska. And the crop of that field was dying, wasting away in a supercosmic winter beyond all imagination.

It was then that I started to scream, yet in the vast, cosmic aether, my shrieks carried no sound. I was whisked backwards into my own pointless universe, past pointless galaxies and pointless nebulae and worlds before finally arriving at my own wretched corner of existence. I careened back to this dying Earth and through the accursed convex portal of that cabin's attic, landing with a harsh thump directly outside it, stripped to my bare skin as poor Bryson had been. And just like Bryson, I lay there for what seemed like an eternity, screaming shrieks as terrible or perhaps even more terrible than the one's my manservant emitted that morning. Eventually my shrieks devolved into a mad laughter not unlike Shepard's, and finally pitiful sobs of despair.

When I regained what I had left of my senses, the dim light of the morning sun was pouring into the attic, this time from the southeast. Or was it just plain east? Or was it the morning sun at all? No matter. Nothing matters anymore in the putrid corner of existence.

I shambled downstairs, still uttering faint cries of despair. After the long journey out of the attic I finally made it to my bedroom and slipped into a mismatched suit which you have found my corpse in. I was now sane enough to remember poor Bryson, and I shuffled over to his bedroom to discover he was gone. Perhaps he had awoken while I was away on my eldritch voyage, and in his insanity had run away from our cabin to be killed by our world's enraged wildlife. Or maybe it had been more than just a few minutes or hours that I had been away, perhaps it has been entire decades, centuries, millennia. I cannot tell now with the way time has degraded along with the rest of our sad little universe. Maybe the cosmos just opened its terrible mouth and swallowed poor Bryson whole. I do not and shall not know.

All I know is that someone may find this accursed cabin, with its forbidden convex doorway in the attic, which as I write hums terribly above me. And all I can do now is give that person all the mercy my frayed soul has left. As I said at the beginning of this account, I have written it for the EXPLICIT purpose of keeping you, reader, whoever you are from entering that terrible portal. I would advise you to leave this house at once and burn it down. Burn the whole forest down! Burn the whole world down! It does not matter now, for everything will be dead and rotting in the supercosmos soon enough. If you must know what secrets are beyond that portal I have just told you all that is there, so please, reader, do not experience that forbidden knowledge for yourself.

It is over now. Outside the light is either dimming into dusk or slowly coming unto dawn. I cannot tell. The only hope I have left lies in the barrel of this revolver, the same which Bryson used to mercifully execute Shepard, who too had gazed into things he should not have. As I write I am cocking the chamber. I am going to put it in my mouth now.

Goodbye.


End file.
